I'd like to offer a little variety but the stories seem to keep coming: this time it's Kaitlyn Lasitter whose recent days in the news eye have shown us another inaccessible home.
At the top of yesterday's C-J was a big picture (here online, over on the right, scroll down a bit) of Kaitlyn being carried into her house by her father. You can see the steps in the lower left of the photo.
Kaitlyn Lasitter was the teen whose feet were chopped off by a Kentucky Kingdom amusement park ride last summer. There's lots online about that -- here's a C-J story, and a google search brings up tons more.
Very little, though, about her home's inaccessibility. In yesterday's C-J story, reporter Charlie White tell us that
Before Kaitlyn received her prosthesis, just getting from one room of the family's Germantown home to another was difficult for her because the door openings of the family's near-century-old home are too narrow for her wheelchair.
Randy Lasitter said he often had to carry her, while at other times, Kaitlyn had to crawl.
I'm glad this got into the story. I'd still like to see more focus on the problems caused by inaccessible homes in this community. And I'd like to see some public discussion about what should be done about it. Lots of commununities are ensuring that new homes have at least basic access. That's a movement called visitability, but it hasn't made it to Louisville. You can learn more about it at www.visitability.org.
Kaitlyn Lasitter, like Audrey White, lives in a house in Germantown.
